


World On Fire

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 20:07:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21258908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: Haarken Worldclaimer nests in the ruined spires of Vigilus, lord of all he surveys - yet his master has fled, and foes press in on all sides...





	World On Fire

There are no stars in the sky tonight.

Far-off cannons thunder, the lines of expended munitions swallowed by a backdrop of darkness. Burning buildings throw their cinders into an uncaring void. The stalemated struggle for orbital dominance continues beyond a curtain of toxic clouds and poison smog, great weapons of eternal war clashing unseen as they burn away the high atmosphere. Distant and uncaring as gods, stripping the planet of life with lance strikes and macro armaments.

This world was known for the quality and ubiquity of its shielding devices. There is a dark irony, now, that it will be known forevermore as a place where the barriers failed and howling barbarians swept in.

Or it would have been. It could have been. It still might be.

The wind howls like an abandoned infant, demanding attention. It burrows greedily into every opening, a corpse-worm seeking fresh offal. It plays in the hollow eye sockets of skulls. It tangles in the chains hung from black armour.

It chatters the filed, rune-scriven teeth on the brace of snare-skulls that adorn a fitfully whining jump-pack. It gives them a mischevious tongue, an ethereal voice.

‘The Warmaster has fled,’ they giggle. ‘Calgar lives. Vigilus stands triumphant.’

Their answer is spoken through three separate vox-emitters, flicking from one misfiring speaker to the next. Recorded cries of agony lick at every syllable, the words drooling out like pus from a gangrenous wound. ‘I would flay you for your insolence.’

‘Late in the day for that, Worldclaimer.’

‘True.’

Haarken surveys his blighted realm from on high, the ruins of a trade prince’s private spire his own squalid nest. He perches like a great raven, eyeing misfortune below with unblinking eyes, his tattered wings close to his shivering body.

The madness has come again. It is a poison that cannot be driven out, only endured, only burnt out with fever and sweat. There are words he has read, signs he has seen, rituals he has observed that do not rest easily in the meat of his mortal frame. One does not sip from the cup of Chaos and expect to remain unchanged. One cannot accept the title of Herald and then shy back from the displeasure of their dark patrons.

There is no unkindness that the Ruinous Powers will not gift upon those who have failed them. A spear was driven into the soil here. A sacrifice was promised. A debt remains unpaid.

The Raptor Lord shifts in his rookery, uncomfortably unaware of what growths might be bubbling below the scarred surface of his artificer battle-plate. He has had little time to rest -- not that he risks sleep any more -- since the invasion began. Less than that to see to his wounds or conduct field repairs on his cantankerous wargear.

Some nights, when the whispers come, he wonders if he will be able to remove it at all. He wonders if he will want to.

He needs to kill something.

Haarken rolls his shoulders, the ceramite grumbling in protest. He blink-clicks away fuel consumption warnings and the first battle-queries of his flock, ever-alert to the prospect of prey. Even the spires they claimed when they first fell upon Vigilus have known fierce fighting in the last week: wild packs of roaming greenskins looking for plunder, as well as the camo-cloaked wraiths of the Ultramarine Vanguard.

His battle-brothers can rest a little longer, in whatever black dreams strive to consume them.

When Haarken ignites his jump-pack and falls from the trade-spire, the Helspear in hand, it is an escape.

The thrill of flight has never left him, even the brutal punch of assault jets, since he was a neophyte. The slightest movement controls his descent, the split-second of decisions: evading this outcropping of solid ferrocrete, shattering through this cross-spar depicting an Imperial Saint, keeping the tell-tale plume of his fall concealed within the shadows and smog.

There is a freedom of sorts, between the leap and the strike, that he has learned to cherish.

Here in this element, he feels a true purity of purpose, a shedding of doubt and the demands of his position like old skin. On the cusp of calamity, at the very tip of the catastrophe curve where an assault jump turns from shock attack to suicide is where the Worldclaimer finds his truth.

He shatters the night sky like a dark comet, a black arrow, a celestial phenomenon.

His boots turn the uncomprehending greenskin at his landing point into a crater of smoking, scattered flesh, throwing the surrounding mob from their feet in the concussion of impact. There is no chance for them to recover, to rally to their stupefied leader, to bellow their war-cries and find that brute courage innate to their kind. He gives them no quarter.

The Helspear flashes out in a lethal semi-circle, a sweep that splashes stinking xeno innards out in a radial. Their deathly mewls are drunk in by the vox-recorders that stud Haarken’s armour, the last pathetic sighs of life.

Then they are regurgitated, woven into the tapestry of terror that spills from the loom of the Worldclaimer’s laud-hailers. Hundreds of Orkish last breaths, exhaled over and over, their slayer stealing even their warrior spirits for his use.

What can the savages do but cower back? They are no mighty Warbosses, no elite-ranking overseers, not even notables in warbands of their own. Scavengers. Green-skinned vermin.

The Helspear has drunk the blood of kings and emperors. They are not worthy of it.

With a snap of displacing air, Haarken activated the lightning claw built into his left gauntlet. That was a better weapon for the dispatching of chattel.

The madness rolled, thick and heavy. It hazes his vision. It washes up knowledge on the gasping shores of his consciousness like bloated bodies from the deep fathoms. It is a charge and a warning.

Haarken moves faster than the human eye can track. His mastery of the assault arts are absolute, the response of his jump-pack almost beyond conscious command. He stands broader, taller than others of his ilk, the physique of a true brawler rather than the hungry leanness of lesser Raptors. Nothing so large should move so swiftly, so fluidly when the jets fire to accentuate his lunge -- away from the cowering xenos.

A hyper-accelerated slug passes through the space that, until less than a second before, the Worldclaimer’s skull-faced helm had occupied. It snaps, supersonic, into a hab wall and detonates for good measure.

The kill-shot failed, the Ultramarine Vanguard slipped their cloaks, blades drawn, rifle discarded.

It was more than personal. It was Vigilus, triumphant.

Haarken drew sparks as he skidded to a halt, a channel cut through the cratered ferrocrete his evasion had canted across.

‘An ambush?’ the vox crackled and hissed, underscored by the dying cries of Space Marines, their final moments of failure. ‘I expected more honour from the Ultramarines.’

The Vanguard squad fanned out, each covering the other with long knives as they closed in. No light gleamed from their blackened plate. No sound emitted from their power armor: no thrum of energy from power packs, no hiss of servoes. They were silent in all respects: no ballads would be sung, no stories would be told of the murder they intended this starless night.

‘They expected more competency from the Black Legion,’ whispered the skull-rack.

‘It is to be a night of disappointments.’

‘So it seems.’

Haarken had no need to engage at such a disadvantage. He could simply retreat, leave the trap. He could call the flock from their sleep: in a moment the air would be filled with falling Raptors. For a strike-force to infiltrate this deeply, however, meant that no matter where he flew there would be no safety. To let a lesser predator stalk his territory meant more than defeat.

For all that the Raptor Lord cherished his wings, he was no stranger to battle upon the rude earth. One against five was not so terrible odds.

They were not the frothing berserkers of Khorne or the glory-starved fiends of Slaanesh, however. They were Ultramarines, moulded anew in the image of a living Primarch, possessed by resolution and duty just as surely as their fallen cousins were by daemons. They would strike as one, defend as one - die as one.

That had always been their way.

Haarken struck first. It was the only way to fight free of the trap. It was a hunter’s strike, designed to cripple, to wound, to blood an animal so it could be tracked and run down. The Helspear sang out, straight and true, breaking the Ultramarine phalanx advance, flensing the lead warrior’s thigh to the bone as though he wore no armour at all. He staggered. The phalanx shivered. And a weakness appeared.

Not without cost. A Vanguard’s focus was on the Helspear, not the sparking claw on Haarken’s left. It tore his head from his shoulders before he could defend himself.

And it left the Raptor Lord’s right exposed. A gladius cut deep into his flank, glancing only from the last layer of ceramite between blade and ribs. Another left a searing line of quick-clotting blood down Haarken’s forearm as he parried away another blow with the Helspear’s haft. He turned into the last blow, catching it on one scarred pauldron -- an old move, from the old days.

Helmet lenses conveyed no emotion. Haarken triggered a burst of his jets as the Vanguard engaged his mag-locks, hoping to anchor himself to the ground.

The forces tore the Marine’s legs off from the knee down, the thrust of assault jets overpowering merely superhuman tissues. The Raptor Lord and his killer crashed together against the grand archway of a trade-spire, shaking the gladius free of the Vanguard’s desperate hands.

Haarken gutted him, the lightning claws carving the Ultramarine from hip to throat, shredding both hearts in their passage, the ionising field failing to eliminate the blood before the Worldclaimer has turned back to the four survivors, spattering them with their comrade’s vital essence.

The hamstrung Marine was reaching for the pistol locked to his thigh. In ideal circumstances, it could be drawn and fired in a second and a half at most.

The Helspear left Haarken’s hand in a fraction of that time. It transfixed the wounded Ultramarine’s gorget, pitching him back to fall, writhing, on Vigilus’ thirsty streets.

To their credit, they died in silence. There was nothing for the recorders to take from them. Whether they had been briefed on the favourite terror tactic of the Black Legion’s Herald or that they were simply too stubborn to give their foe any measure of their death, it did not matter. They knew no fear.

Haarken’s laud-hailer burst into the agonised screams of a brutalised hero. Marneus Calgar’s involuntary cry as the daemon-blade Drach’nyen carved through him, his agony screeching out for all to hear.

It had the intended effect. The three who remained charged the disarmed Raptor Lord, out of step. He took the first easily, stamping down on the Marine’s leading leg, grounding through plate, bone and tendon with inhuman strength. The second’s gladius clattered harmlessly off a raised vambrace. The third thrust true, through the meat of Haarken’s warding arm. For this wound, the Ultramarine received a snarling backhand and spun away, clutching at his flayed face, leaving his weapon embedded in the Worldclaimer’s mortal flesh.

The second swung again, decapitating one of the members of the skull rack as the Raptor Lord ducked the blow, his rising knee shattering the first attacker’s skull as surely as a bolt gun, the lightning claw swinging again to sever the Vanguard’s arm. Not even this deadly blow elicited a response, only a faceless glare from behind a polished helm.

Haarken swatted aside the returning, final gladius strike and plunged his lightning claw into that expressionless metal. The Marine went limp immediately, his soul sent screaming into the Warp.

For the second time that night, the Worldclaimer looked over his domain: five slain followers of the Corpse-Emperor, their blood consecrating his weapons. Their blades sheathed in his flesh. He drew the offending items from his body, casting them away into the night. The Orks were welcome to them when they came crawling back.

He could have evaded every blow. He had no need to spill his blood here, in a meaningless gutter on a lost world. The madness whispered how. It spoke with surety as to what would happen next: the angle of the strike, the wielder’s eyes, the very thoughts in their clouded minds.

He could have set this world on fire without the Despoiler needing to take a single step.

‘The long count begins again,’ he said. His true voice, free of the vox-tampering or enhancement. A weary voice. ‘The numberless days.’

The skulls did not reply. How could they? They were gristle and bone and nothing more.

Haarken looked up. Into the dampening fog, the light pollution, the flare of cannons and las and lance fire.

Perhaps he had hoped to see stars.


End file.
